Birds of prey program to be held in national park

A program about birds of prey called “Heads Up for Hunters of the Sky” will be held at 2 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 6, at the Oconaluftee Visitor Center in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park outside Cherokee.

It will showcase live birds of prey in captivity that aren’t able to survive in the wild. The presenter is Michael Skinner, executive director of the Balsam Mountain Trust in Jackson County. Before he joined Balsam Mountain Preserve, he was the Emmy-nominated host of “Georgia Outdoors” on Georgia Public Television.

The program is being put on by the Great Smoky Mountains Association. Limited to the first 50 participants to register by Feb. 5. Cost is $10 for GSMA members and $35 for non-members, which includes a membership. SmokiesInformation.org or 888.898.9102, ext. 325, 222 or 254.

This Must Be the Place

Standing in line at the Old Europe coffee shop in downtown Asheville, I said that to my old friend, Jerica. It was a rainy Sunday evening and we’d just gotten out of a documentary screening (about Tim Leary and Ram Dass) at the Grail Moviehouse. While I was mulling over the cosmic nature and theme of the film and what our place is in the universe (as per usual), I looked over at Jerica and smiled.

Reading Room

Of course, we’re intended to read from cover to cover many books — novels, histories, biographies, and more. It would make little sense to begin Mark Helprin’s novel A Soldier of the Great War on page 340 of its 860 pages. We might open and commence reading Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Boat, on page 241, but we’d miss some of the…